The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

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obel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about pro￾teins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker 

has succeeded with the almost impossible feat 

of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis 

Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI 

model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting 

proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries 

hold enormous potential. 

The diversity of life testifes to proteins’ amazing capacity 

as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemi￾cal reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins 

also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies 

and the building blocks of diferent tissues. 

“One of the discoveries being recognised this year 

concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The 

other is about fulflling a 50-year-old dream: predicting 

protein structures from their amino acid sequences. 

Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” 

says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for 

Chemistry.

Proteins generally consist of 20 diferent amino acids, 

which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, 

David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design 

a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since 

then, his research group has produced one imaginative 

protein creation after another, including proteins that 

can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials 

and tiny sensors. 

The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein 

structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together 

in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional 

structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function. 

Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein 

structures from amino acid sequences, but this was 

notoriously difcult. However, four years ago, there was 

a stunning breakthrough.

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an 

AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have 

been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 

million proteins that researchers have identifed. Since 

their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more 

than two million people from 190 countries. Among 

a myriad of scientifc applications, researchers can 

now better understand antibiotic resistance and create 

images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now 

predict protein structures and design our own proteins